The representation of heroism and villainy in Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's castle

Abstract

This study drew together several paradigmatic perspectives and contexts to understand how the hero/villain binary is conceptually represented in Bartók’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. These included the intertextual relationships between the operatic text (including both narrative and music) and academic commentary, and the operatic text and the cultural milieu (fin de siècle Hungary and the Decadent movement) of its authors Béla Balázs and Béla Bartók. This is a qualitative study that critically considers the implicitly ‘heroic’ description of the character Bluebeard in Bartók’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle by exploring the narrative and musical representation of the concepts ‘villainy’ and ‘heroism’ in the opera. These concepts are approached through the combined contexts of the fairy tale, the Gothic novel, and the Decadent Movement. This study also considers the impact of semiotic and rhetorical devices like musical topics and tropes on characterization in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. The research has revealed that the characters of Bluebeard and Judith can be viewed as representative of archetypes whose development correspond to general developments in fairy tales, Gothic literature and Decadent literature. Bartók in turn engages with these features by foregrounding certain elements in the music like the tritone, semitone motifs, and the use of verbunkos as both a developmental principle and a feature of vocal characterization. In both narrative and musical texts, signs are troped together to highlight specific internal aspects that then suggest to the viewer different kinds of heroes and villains. Consequently, the study has found that the characters Bluebeard and Judith both occupy the roles of ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ interchangeably and ambiguously, and that their textual identities are characterised by elements of paradox and reversal.